Going up up up! And it’s gone. Here’s the second part of my report about how a Google featuring impacts the downloads of a casual game. Scroll down a bit if you want to read part 1 first.

There is the curve in all its glory. It’s clear where the featuring started and where it ended. Before we got the notion of a featuring taking place we had around 30 downloads/day. Yes, 30. The featuring process seemed to be in a form of roll out, with Google adding places bit by bit and then removing them towards the end. First places lifted our downloads to around 300, and then from there we jumped to around 5000-8000 installs/day.

As Google started rolling us out from featuring we have quickly dropped to around 300-400 installs/day.

We can see that we are dropping in rankings and will be out in no time. It seems that the featuring will have no long term effect on our daily downloads. We are still featured in 29 places under the adventure and action category in Google Play, which is probably the reason we are still getting 300-400 installs/day.

All in all, being featured by Google is very valuable. We could have spent $50 000 on Ace Tales ourselves to achieve the same results, but it’s a real shame that it doesn’t have a more long term effect. My take on Google Play is that in order to get a steady nice stream of downloads you have to get into the top Free Games list. However you do it, that’s where you need to be. Because the games there will receive a majority of downloads. Problem is, that the Top Free list is still filled with old games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, to get there you have to push 1 of those games out. And if your game isn’t good enough, it won’t stay there even if you manage to push it in there with a huge amount of downloads.

Another way would be to have some other source than Google Play to drive installs, but achieving 5000 installs/day without spending a lot of money is very hard. Feel free to subscribe up to the right if you find my blog useful!